The Long Sleep (2 page)

Behind him the purple lightstrip in the colder vault dimmed and finally winked out altogether.

Simultaneously, the overhead lights in the new chamber rose steadily until he could see that the dust had settled over this machinery too, the death shroud of the inanimate.

Along the wall on his left, sixteen lockers stood like narrow caskets, each with a first name stenciled just above the three short, horizontal slits of the air vents. Intrigued by the names, he forgot about the door. When he remembered it, he was to late to act: the door swung shut at his back and was instantly, electronically locked. Angry with himself, he continued to the lockers and opened them one after the other. Eight of them contained women's clothing in an assortment of sizes. Of the other eight, which contained men's clothing, only one held a suit that had been tailored for his wide shoulders and narrow waist. He dressed in the dark green, one-piece jumpsuit and soft black leather boots, then closed the locker and stared at the name on the door. JOEL.

Joel . . .

He said it a few times to himself, then aloud. But he could not make it fit.

He looked at the other names and tried to find a memory in them: ARCHIE, WILL, LEONARD, TAMUR, ALICIA, MARY . . . Although he strained to evoke a face to match each name, all fifteen remained nonentities.

Since none of the lockers contained identification for its owner—other than the simple uniform and the name on the door—he turned away and explored the remainder of the rectangular room. A row of teleprinters stood silent. Teleprint screens along the high ceiling stared down at him like cataracted eyes, unlighted, unmoving, yet somehow watchful. Computer consoles. Print-out troughs. Three empty file cabinets. Two desks: empty, dusty. The contents of the room told him nothing more than what he'd found in the lockers.

When he sat in one of the command chairs, he was surprised to discover that he understood how to read the banks of controls, graphs, charts and monitoring screens set before him. They were all designed either to report on or change conditions in the pods: subject's heartbeat, temperature, metabolism, hormonal secretions . . . All the controls were now unlighted and might or might not be functional. He didn't see any reason, at the moment, to play around with them.

Despite his grasp of these details, he could not formulate an understanding of the overall purpose of this place. He felt he should be able to build from the specific to the general, but he had no luck. The controls were known, but their part in the larger design remained a mystery. He was like an unskilled laborer assembling the housing of a complex computer system: he took part in the production of the finished item without ever really knowing what purpose the damned thing served.

Yet he knew that in the past he had been at home here, well versed in the intentions of the ex-perimenters. Now, that was as lost to him as his own identity.

Joel?

Joel who? Joel what, when, and where?

Angry, he stood. He wanted to strike out with his blocky fists, but he could find no one to take his rage. The mouse dropped unexpectedly into the maze must also experience this undirected fury.

And he would have to solve his problem just as the mouse did—by finding his way to the end of the maze and picking up his reward. If there was a reward. Maybe a booby prize.

He found the outside door of the observation chamber and opened it. The hinges squeaked.

The lights came on in a long corridor when he entered it. Not all the bulbs in the two ceiling strips worked, but he had enough light to see the dreary cement block walls, red-tiled floor, gray soundproof ceiling, and a great deal of dust.

For the first time he realized that the dust held no footprints. No one had passed this way in years. Decades?

“Hello!” he said.

Though it was obviously futile to cry out, he was unable to restrain his compulsive need for companionship.

The corridor was short. Only four rooms opened from it. Each of these was a cubicle devoid of everything but a desk, chair, and unused file cabinet. At one time these must have been the offices of minor executives; now, the dust was nearly half an inch thick, a gray-brown blanket that softened the sharp edges of the furniture, many times thicker than the jacket of dust he had seen elsewhere.

At the end of the hall, two elevator doors were recessed in the wall. Above each was an unlighted floor indicator that was framed by a chrome strip. Filmed with dust, darkened with age, the plastic numerals were only barely readable.

Joel touched the controls of the left-hand lift and waited. When nothing happened he tried the cage on the right. The floor indicator on the right-hand lift lighted instantly, a flickering yellow with red numbers. The lift was at the eighteenth floor, the topmost level. It descended so rapidly that he thought for a moment that it had snapped its cables. A moment later, however, the doors opened with a rasping noise which set his teeth on edge, and the lift awaited his use.

He didn't trust the elevator, but he had no choice but to consign himself to it. He stepped inside, pushed the button for the second level. The doors closed with less noise than had accompanied their opening, and he was carried swiftly, smoothly upwards.

The second level was larger than the first and composed strictly of laboratories and chemical storage closets. Again, he found no windows or doors to the outside world. All the file cabinets and records drawers had been emptied; he could not find a trace of their contents. Though he recognized the purpose and nature of some of the machinery and furniture—slate-topped lab tables, racks of Pyrex beakers, rusted Bunsen burners, a Lexical-7 computer for chemical analysis, acid-resistant porcelain sinks—he could not deduce from all of it what might have been done here.

On the third floor—which was larger than the second, as if the building were an inverted pyramid—half the space was given over to storage, half to offices. No scrap of paper remained, no mark of individual presence. Even if they had not left in a hurry, the residents and workers would surely have overlooked some minim of written material from which he could have ascertained the nature of their business. This complete sweep of the building indicated a cautious withdrawal, as if they had known some hated antagonist was soon to come into possession of the place, as if they didn't wish to leave behind anything of value beyond the structure itself.

Was a war in progress?

That seemed unlikely. What had happened to the conquering horde before which the original owners might have fled? Once the building had been evacuated, no one had come to claim it.

Besides, if war were the reason for abandonment, why leave the men and women in the pods?

After all, the cylinders and the sleepers seemed to be the central reason for the entire project.

Still searching for an answer with which he could live, Joel came to the last office on that level— where he finally uncovered a trace of the people who had worked here. Another corpse.

It was the skeleton of a large man, slumped across the desk in a posture of defeat which it had held for many years. In the open air the worms had made swift work of it; it contained not a scrap of leathery flesh. The skeleton was white and clean and looked as if it had been scrubbed with sand and water. It had no hair. The few tattered garments it wore were so rotten that they crumbled into ashes when he touched them.

Joel carefully pulled the skeleton away from the desk and let it slide back in the swivel chair.

Finger bones rattled together like dry sticks of kindling.

He opened all the drawers in the desk, hoping to find something, anything, even the last words of a man long dead. But the drawers contained only dust.

When he turned away from the desk, the skeleton appeared to be glaring at him. Its gleaming skull was thrust forward, shoulders hunched, as if it were ready to launch itself at him.

He swung it around until it faced the wall. It stared at the plaster with the same intensity which it had focused on him a moment earlier. Perhaps its gaze wasn't one of malevolent intent, but a longing for the sarcophagus where it might rest after so many years of sitting in a chair.

When he continued his search, safe from fossilized observation, he met with more disappoint-ment. The four-drawer file cabinet was locked, raising hope that something worthwhile was protected within. But when he used a heavy, rust-filmed letter opener to snap the main latch, he found all four drawers empty. The supplies closet held no supplies.

As he closed the closet door a cold finger tapped his shoulder as if testing his solidity. For an instant he was certain that the skeleton was touching him. However, when he leaped sideways and turned on it, he found that it was worse than that, worse than the skeleton.

He backed up, bumped into the file cabinet, and realized that he was trapped.

“Stay back,” he said.

The creature which had come up behind him now took another step in his direction, raising its pale right hand. It had no face. Where its features should have been, there was only a smooth, plastic sheen of flesh. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. No hair on the bright, shiny head.

It reached for him.

“No!”

It touched him with fingers so cold they stung his wrist and sent shivers through him.

Joel drew back.

The faceless man followed him.

He swayed as his strength seemed to drain out of him. He sank to his knees, gasping for breath, sweating . . . He watched the floor circle round like an opponent waiting for a chance to jump him, bear him down, and finish him. What was happening here? What had this thing done to him? With his last bit of strength, he raised his head and looked at the faceless man.

Noseless, eyeless, mouthless, terrifying, the creature slowly tilted its barren face towards his, as if it were returning his gaze.

What have you done to me?
he wanted to ask.

He couldn't speak.

Darkness swooped down like a huge bird. Wings enfolded him: pinions, feathers, spiny ribs . . .

Dizzy, he pitched forward, out cold. He was unaware that the icy fingers touched him again, exploring him more fully this time, taking his pulse and thumbing back his eyelids to see if he were genuinely unconscious.

III

Joel lifted a lead blanket and rose out of a bed of molasses, shook off the covers of darkness and came dizzily awake. In the first flush of sensation, as he waited for the whirling to subside, he did not remember the faceless man. When the memory returned, it was like a punch just below the heart, and it stopped his breathing for a long moment.

He could hear voices, but he didn't want to open his eyes to see who was speaking. He didn't want to discover that it was the man without a face, for then he'd have to wonder how the thing could speak when it had no mouth. Curiosity like that could lead only to madness.

He contented himself with listening, and he discovered that the voices were in another room, distant enough to be meaningless. He opened his eyes then. He was lying in a huge bed in a darkened room.

The voices stopped abruptly, as if the speakers knew he was finally awake.

A door slammed somewhere in the house. Footsteps. Creaking floorboards. Another door, closer at hand this time, opened and closed more quietly than the first. Like evenly spaced sighs, soft footsteps sounded on the carpet. He had closed his eyes again, but he felt the light the visitor had switched on. Someone loomed over him, casting a shadow across his face. A hand touched his forehead. It was a warm small hand, a woman's hand.

Joel opened his eyes again and stared straight into her eyes which were blue and quite large, one of them partially covered by the thick fall of her black hair. She had a pug nose, full lips, and a creamy expression. She wasn't beautiful. She was better than that: cute and saucy. The left corner of her mouth had an insouciant twist; her blue eyes were merry. He wanted to reach up and embrace her and pull her down and kiss her. At least.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

He nodded when he found his mouth was too dry for him to speak.

Her face showed deep concern. “Does your head hurt?”

“No.” He wheezed like a punctured bellows when he spoke.

“You're sure.”

“Sure.”

“The doctor's been here and gone already.” She used both her hands to caress his face. Her fingertips pressed gently against his chapped lips. Obviously, there was an intimacy between them of which he was ignorant. Hell, he didn't even know who she was.

“I'll give you your next medpac treatment if you're ready for it,” she said.

“My what?”

“Medpac treatment,” she said, frowning at him.

Rather than reveal the extent of his amnesia before he knew who she was and where he was, he nodded as if he understood. “Yeah. I think I could use a medpac.”

She sat down beside him. “You'll be well soon, ball-sized device that looked like a water-smoothed stone. She fooled with it for a moment, giving him a chance to study her clothing: a white blouse with a huge roll collar and a deeply cut neckline and six pearly buttons on each long cuff, brief shorts the color of wet pimentos so thin that they might have been sprayed onto her, and boots which snugly encased her feet and half her calves. She had long brown legs, perfect and elegant as any he had ever seen.